Born in Clydach Vale in 1897, Lewis Jones began work underground at the age of twelve. He worked for the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, was elected a County Councillor in 1936, and died in 1939 after a day of speaking at numerous public meetings in support of the Spanish Civil War.Stephen Knight described Jones' work as novelist thus: "Lewis Jones produced two novels that remain classics of international industrial fiction and testify to the oppressed but resistant and creative character of industrial South Wales."
